911 NSFW
The Void in OIDV (Officer-Involved Domestic Violence)
(911 NSFW -demo is a song written and performed by I.C. Dame Project, produced by D.A. Bassett, Flock and Field Productions. As the title suggests, it is not sufficient for work.)
“If you are a victim of police violence and have ever tried to get help, you may have discovered that there is a wealth of information and resources available to women and children who have experienced violence at the hands of civilian men, but little for those whose abusers are police officers.”
I came across that quote on the landing page of a website called AbuseofPower.Info created by author and retired victim’s advocate, Diane Wetendorf. Ms. Wetendorf specialized in assisting victims of domestic violence perpetrated by the police. As a survivor of OIDV, officer-involved domestic violence, the statement rings true with me. AbuseofPower.info remains one of the few online resources available to victims of OIDV, and it is often the only validation they receive for the crimes committed against them.
Diane Wetendorf says this about police abuse:
“ Police training includes ways to control physical confrontations and how to disarm attackers when they have no weapons other than their hands. They learn unarmed methods of self-protection, how to confront and control individuals and crowds, methods to pursue and capture suspects. Police are taught to control the level of physical force they use— the continuum of force; how to use their presence and voice to control a situation, when to use restraints, body strikes, batons and firearms. They learn to match these control tactics to the level of a person’s resistance. If someone refuses to comply with an order, the officer determines the level of force needed to make the person submit. Trained and skilled in using tactics and intimidation to maintain control at work, it is the families that suffer the most when that training and power is abused at home.”
My ex could drop me to the ground with only the slightest amount of pressure applied to my wrist or forearm. This is a pressure-point technique police use to gain compliance from resisting suspects. He’d say he was just kidding around after he did it, but the message was clear: You are powerless around me.
Police Power & Control Wheel, ©1998, 2003, 2007, 2014 Diane Wetendorf. All Rights Reserved.
Blessed with a barrel chest and an imposing stature, my ex was part of the SWAT team. He was assigned and trained with the battering ram specializing in gaining access to locked or blocked doorways. As time went on, his controlling behavior at home escalated to sexual and physical violence. The night my ex broke down our locked bedroom door— no battering ram necessary— in an effort to gain access to me was when I made the decision to leave the marriage.
The tactics learned in police training that some, in turn, go on to use in their own households are:
Isolation - “Cops isolate people when they interview or interrogate them because they understand the psychological impact of depriving people of their freedom to interact with others. Isolation makes it easy for the officer to establish who is in control.”
At home this looks like an abuser demeaning and devaluing the victim and her family and friends to the point where she distances herself from support systems as a means to avoiding upset in the home.
Interrogation - “The tactic of interrogation is used when police believe that a suspect is trying to conceal something from them. The interrogator establishes control by breaking down the suspect through isolation and withholding access to food, sleep, and bathroom breaks during a period of ceaseless questioning. He induces stress by accusing the suspect of the deed and relating the severe consequences certain to follow. By being alternately friendly and hostile, he can keep the suspect emotionally and mentally off balance. This continues until the officer obtains a confession.”
When interrogation takes the place of conversation— it did in our household— you can rest assured the floors are littered in eggshells for its family members to walk on.
Verbal Abuse - “Cops use language to establish and/or maintain dominant-submissive relationships. They use words to humiliate, embarrass, discredit, dehumanize, and devalue people. They also use words to provoke a confrontation that can justify the use of force and/or an arrest.”
The abuser’s playbook is as narrow as the mind that abides by it. My ex didn’t stray from the typical misogynist and homophobic slurs and obscenities to cut down his family members.
Emotional Abuse - “Cops learn that humiliating, degrading, embarrassing, and ridiculing people wears them down emotionally and psychologically.”
Shame was the emotion my ex trafficked in — his laughing and pointing out my mispronunciation of a word is an example. It could be something trivial about my physical appearance— like my nose being too fat or how freakish I was that my second toe was longer than my big one, but the little digs and sharp nicks grew and worsened with time. When I defended myself, my ex gaslit, denied or minimized my feelings; or he flat out called me crazy.
During our separation, I was subject to threats, smear campaigns and a barrage of harassing texts, emails and voicemails from my ex.
Surveillance - “Police sometimes let suspects know that they are under physical and electronic surveillance because they’ve learned the psychological impact of being watched at all times. Surveillance makes a suspect anxious, wondering when and where the cops are watching, agonizing over what information they have. The uncertainty as to when and where the cops are watching and what they may do leads a suspect to internalize the control and modify usual behavior.”
After I left and secured an apartment for the children and myself, my soon-to-be-ex, with a pretense of seeing the children, persuaded the babysitter to let him in while I was at work. This is when went he went through my belongings and read through my personal journals exacerbating an already dangerous and volatile separation period. Most domestic violence homicides occur when the victim attempts to leave.
In June of 2021, the State of Connecticut, passed a bill making coercive control a criminal offense falling under the law of domestic violence. Titled Jennifer’s Law, the bill is named for two Connecticut women, both victims of domestic violence, Jennifer Farber Dulos and Jennifer Magnano, both murdered at the hands of their abusers.
The law expands the state's definition of domestic violence to include coercive control, which is defined as a pattern of behavior toward a person who is, or has been, an intimate partner or family or household member ... which causes fear or harm to such person or restricts such person's freedom of action.
It’s a step in the right direction, but are the courts even able to recognize coercive control?
The chilling reality is that the tactics of coercively controlling behavior— isolation, interrogation, gaslighting, name calling, disparaging remarks, surveillance via stalking and monitoring your activities—are part of the police academy’s training curriculum.
Other tactics of coercive control include:
Legal Abuse - Police officers are often seen as pillars in the community and their word can carry more weight than their victims. More so within the court system where they actually have working relationships with judges (maybe even had coffee and donuts in their home some Sunday morning awaiting a judge’s signature for a pressing search warrant) and prosecuting attorneys. It makes fighting for custody a playing field for the abuser and an un-winnable nightmare for a victim and her children.
Our court-approved, half-in-half split of our children’s time with each parent had nothing to do with their best interest or a a father’s love and desire to coparent and be a positive influence and role model in his children’s lives. It had everything to do with the abuser fighting to maintain as much control over his victim as possible and a court system designed to fail her.
Financial Abuse is common in coercive control.
When our divorce was granted, his dickering every week to lessen his child support payment along with the personal insults he’d scratch out on the check memo lines each week was another costly battle played out in front of a Family Court judge. It’s the reason why a garnishment to his wages was ordered for child support.
Abusers of coercive control abuse their children. I was damaged to believe otherwise. They will weaponize the children against you by creating the narrative you’re a bad parent or belittling you in front of them.
Left unchecked, these behaviors and actions permeate and erode over aspects of victims’ daily lives, both in the abuser’s presence and out of it.
“Why doesn’t she just leave?”
I did. Almost 20 years ago.
I sought a fair end to our marriage that wouldn’t devastate us from an uncivil man. Expecting that the abuse would stop with the signing of the paperwork was magical thinking on my part. I didn’t understand that an abuser always seeks to dominate and control his victim in varying degrees of force so long as there’s a connection between them. My divorce legally bound me and the children to our abuser.
Victims, already isolated from an abusive relationship remain that way in regards to finding help. They don’t seek support through the normal channels because there’s no help for victims that doesn’t fall under the armpit of court and police municipalities. The abuser has trained the victim help is not on the way for her because he has a role within the system. He has access, power and influence within it. He is not wrong.
I spent years in therapy trying to untangle what happened within my nuclear family, why I couldn’t communicate effectively with my ex husband and why I felt powerless in my role as a parent. In our family’s construct, triangulation tactics used by my ex— pitting one against the other— became so deeply ingrained for its members that no one could be trusted and no place felt truly safe. To understand the longterm impacts coercive control has on a family you only have to look at the fractured, non-existent or court-restrained interpersonal relationships that are knotted up within ours.
Internet results for victims seeking education and support are infuriatingly paltry. In my efforts, I’m able to uncover wisps of a self-reporting survey conducted in the 1990s. In that report, 40% of police officers admitted to having had incidents of domestic violence within their intimate-partner relationships. With underreporting so common in domestic violence cases and an even tighter-lipped police culture, that number is most assuredly higher.
The outrageously high number is a crisis on fire, and no one’s talking about it?
No one’s meaningfully educating or counseling police families in how to keep police tactics out of their domestic lives. There’s no one gathering data or analyzing police training tactics to see how they might correlate with the abuse victims of OIDV are reporting, perhaps even reconsidering and reforming how police officers are trained.
There’s no database of mental health and legal services trained and specializing in police abuse for victims who leave their abusers. No one’s noticing the continued perpetration victims face even after they’ve taken the legal steps to sever the relationship because no one’s offering victims of OIDV a safe haven uncorrupted by social services for them to escape to. Until we start to recognize what coercive control actually is and recognize that the police are prone to it, nothing can be done to eradicate it. There’s only a void.
Well, I’m stepping into it. Is anyone else here?
A very powerful piece, good on you, Carmen!